Re: [EclipseShell-developer] hello

[Werner S. (murphee) <wer...@gm...>]

Johannes Wagener wrote:
> is the project alive?

Yup, but I've been on a bit of a sabbatical from EclipseShell. The
development is still going on, and I have some new features prototyped
(they should be in the CVS too).


> I need a scripting engine - preferable  javascript /rhino - in my RCP
> application. 

 EclipseShell has Rhino support, so you can definitely prototype scripts
with it.

> It should be able to use the classes in the plugins of the
> project dynamically. 

I'm not sure what exactly you mean. You want the Rhino interpreter (and
scripts running in it) to see the classes of the plugin(s) that your RCP
app consists of?
EclipseShell and the Rhino support use BuddyClassloading that allows
them to see all classes that are exported by Eclipse Plugins (or OSGI
Bundles). So, if your plugin exports it's classes, then that should be
possible.
If you don't want to export the classes, there might still be some other
way of handling this (the OSGI classloading system is remarkably flexible).

> It should also be able to modify the GUI.

Yep, possible too, although there's the complication of the threading
with SWT. You'll need to use SWT Display.syncExec(Runnable) (or it's
asyncExec cousing) method for running code that modifies the GUI.
In JRuby, I have a helper method that does this nicely, because
blocks/closures in Ruby are easy to do. eg.
syncExec {
  # do something on the GUI thread
}

You'll have to come up with a way of doing this in Javascript/Rhino.



> Is eclipse-shell a good choice?

Depends... do you need interactive access to your Scripting engine? Then
EclipseShell is a possible choice; if not, then you can just use a
plugin that provides Rhino (or package it yourself).
As I said: EclipseShell is definitely useful for prototyping scripts and
for quickly accessing functionality in Eclipse.

Again: depends on what you want to do with Rhino.

> what is the difference to eclipse monkey?

EclipseMonkey Scripts are shown in a seperate Menu in the Menubar, so
you can choose and run them. They're also working on some other triggers
for scripts, eg. resource changes, etc.

> can eclipse-shell be used in a RCP?

EclipseShell and the Rhino plugin have dependencies on the editor
framework and JDT, so you'll pull in some big(ish) plugins.
It also uses the Workspace for a lot of things, so if your RCP app
doesn't use/include the resource support, then that might be a problem too.
Otherwise it's not an issue (as far as I can tell).

> i need support for javascript only. is it difficult to use rhino directly?

Nope.


murphee